Once, a house
by teabizarre
Summary: It's over, he thought. It's all over. And then: Luna.


Once, a house

Draco/Luna

_It's over. It's all over._

And then: _Luna._

* * *

His parents were both sentenced; he was not. He sat in the stone trenches and watched as they confessed their entire lives to an audience vividly interested in their remorse. His father's sentence was harsher than his mother's; hers was suspended, but so was her real freedom.

_It's over_. That was what he thought, when the guards gathered his father from the stone seat with its chained armrests. It was what he thought while his mother sobbed at his side, not feeling his hand on hers, not caring for anything but the half of her soul that was being stripped from her.

And his father looked back once, briefly, and everything that the War had cost them was shaded in his face, in every stark line, in the butterfly gray of his eyes, and Draco realized, _It's all over_.

It had cost so much.

* * *

Draco told the story as if to a child: _here is the house, hidden behind its tall hedges. The hedges are overgrown, but they weren't always like this—once they were perfect, linear, set out in straight lines easy for your eyes to understand. There were birds too, once, white peacocks, and a bubbling fountain, and shaded walkways that always felt secret..._

_But the best is the courtyard_, he emphasized. _In winter dead leaves and other debris scrape along its mosaic patterns. His mother never had it cleared, because she knew he liked it so much. And in summer, with the sun out, the sky forms a perfect cobalt ceiling—a never-ending dome reaching far above. And at night the dome becomes dotted with shards of glass as the stars glitter and wink. Really_, he explained, _the only bad part of the courtyard is when it rains. Then it feels like a basin, like one of the cracked ones at Hogwarts._

But of course there was no child, only him and his grieving mother returning to the home that had broken them.

They had not been in the house in more than a month, and before that, only occasionally, as the trials demanded and deferred their presence and confessions. For almost a year it had stood, abandoned for all goals and purposes. Before it had been their home; now it was an empty shell filled with dust and smelling strongly of neglect.

It was eerily preserved—the last thing his father had done was to reorder everything after the Aurors had done with their searching. Harry Potter had been one of that party; Draco still remembered the uneasy look he had about him, as his fellows, with a practiced, efficient sort of savageness, plundered the mansion. Draco could see that Potter had thought it was wrong, somehow; but how could he say anything, how could anyone object, knowing that the Dark Lord had used this place as his base?

Draco thought that that was the worst of all: the Dark Lord had tainted this place as he had tainted them. There were black burn marks just beneath the skin of everything. Scarred, blighted, burned; this was his legacy.

As soon as they stepped into the foyer Narcissa escaped Draco's presence. Her heels clattered noisily on the stone floor as she shoved herself across the length of the room and threw herself up the stairs. She didn't look back, but then, he hadn't expected her to. She loved him, he knew that, but he looked too much like his father. The nose, the chin, but especially the eyes. It was why she had stopped looking at him.

He understood this. Eyes: blue and dreamy. It was why Draco had stopped looking at his mother.

_Luna._

* * *

The dungeon smelled even more horrific than the house above it. Dirt and grime and human waste. No one had been down here since the escape. The Dark Lord's punishment had been severe, and they had all been too afraid to provoke him any further.

Well, that was the official story.

Draco had avoided it because it held all the claustrophobic fears of Luna's imprisonment, and his. She had suffered torture and humiliation, and he had suffered with her—every shard of pain that was driven into her was driven into him, not a mere shadow or echo, but a pristine copy. She bore it out in silence and so did he; pilfering her grateful gazes when he brought her water and food, when he shaded his voice with kindness, when he stopped Wormtail from taunting her. These little services sustained her as they sustained him, though nothing ever passed his lips.

He'd never stopped dreaming.

He coveted these lucid fantasies and hid them in the deepest place within himself that he could find, far beyond the prying eyes of the Dark Lord and his deranged aunt and Snape and the Ministry. Odd little snatches: the way her eyes seemed to find his even when he hid his face in shadow, the candy floss texture of her hair, the way she breathed words when she was sad. His wild inventions were more vivid: his hand finding hers in the dark of the dungeon and leading her from that place to one of safety, her warm breath on his cheek, her bright smile in misty morning light.

And perhaps he could have fought harder against Potter when they'd wrestled for the wands, if he hadn't wanted Potter to escape and take her with him. Sometimes, sometimes, from what he'd seen and heard at Hogwarts, he wondered whether Potter wouldn't have loved her eventually, had Ginny and Cho faded. Blighted families: they had something in common, Luna and Potter.

He took it as some sort of sign that this didn't even bother him, the thought of them together. Potter would have made her happy. He would have coddled her oddities and calmed her insecurities and protected her and made her smile. Draco could see that.

But perhaps he could have fought harder against Potter, could he have convinced himself that Potter would leave her behind, leave her there with him, where he could watch over her and make sure she was at least reasonably cared for. Where, after the War, he could have coerced some sort of freedom for her. He would have made her happy—he would have tried twice as hard, just for the honour of being allowed, just for the glimmer of hope that she might love him back.

He'd dropped the wands. The Elder Wand. He still couldn't believe it.

So much it had cost them; but the price seemed a small one to pay.

* * *

He tells the story as if to a child: _here is the cellar beneath the house, a house that was once pretty and happy and grand. No light reaches this cellar. It was built for secrets, secrets and other things hidden. Inside there is only darkness._

_But it wasn't always this way!_ he explains, careful to make this clear. _Once, there was light—a bright light, a light like no one had ever seen before. This light was the sunshine and moonshine and stars all at once: warm and beautiful and kind and hopeful, always hopeful. The light carried all the dreams of this world, and not even the dark cellar could eat them up. It tried, but the light could not be tainted._

_And for a while_, _a very short while, he knew the light, and he dreamed as well._

But of course there was no child, only him and the darkness of the cellar.

* * *

**Disclaimer:** The characters belong to JK Rowling.

**A/N:** Sequel in the works! Please review.


End file.
